Roleplaying games from historical research
This is, thank whichever divine you follow, the final research episode for the Venice material. It isn’t that I’ve researched all of the things that were on the shopping list that I put in a previous episode, it’s that you get to a point where the research begins to make you want to give the…
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I had thought that the book I’ve just gone through for material would be the last one for the project. It’s “Venetian ships and shipbuilders in the Renaissance” by Frederick Lane. I haven’t been posting these daily on X (as was Twitter) because they removed the feature that allowed me to do it automatically, and…
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This week, we return to Venice. I’m taking part in #City23, which is a writing challenge. Participants try write some material for a city for a role playing game each day. I’ve been using Venice. I’ve reached the stage in the project where I’m going back through a shopping list of material that seems necessary…
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The manners in the court of Queen Elizabeth the First are a difficult thing for most modern Magonomia players, because our various countries now see them, rightly, as repressive. Why this is varies a little: I’m an Australian, and the manners that they are using were, for a long time, used as a racial marker…
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Clark Ashton Smith is one of my favourite fantasy authors but I haven’t been able to use much of his material here on the podcast. He died slightly too late for his material to be available to us in the public domain. Also TSR bought the role-playing rights to his material at some stage and…
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I was listening to a recording of The Crimson Fairy book by Andrew Lang, recorded by Jenny Lundak for Librivox, and struck a colony of the malkins I wrote about in the Medieval Bestiary for Magonomia. I haven’t really used Lang for much. His spider-headed man turns up in Ars Magica, but other than that…
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One of the largest battlefields in Mythic Britain is missing. Could it be hidden with magic like “The Shrouded Glen” to allow a covenant to dwell on a site filled with summonable dead? Never, before this, were more men in this island slain by the sword’s edge–as books and aged sages confirm–since Angles and Saxons…
Read MoreThe transcripts for the episodes in April – June 2023 are now available. Remember that if you’d like to support the podcast, there’s a Patreon page.
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I originally planned to string Lud-in-the-Mist across months, commenting on each episode, the way I did with “The Erl-King’s Daughter” by Lord Dunsany. I shan’t, because although I still think its an excellent book full of material which Ars Magica Players can, and should, steal, it doesn’t need an explanation. A secret passage is a…
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This week a brief extract from the travels of Sir John Mandeville. Sir John Mandeville didn’t exist. We don’t know who really wrote his book: we do know that they tacked it together from previous travel journals. Most of it is highly dubious, but in ours Magica there’s a little section that works really well…
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Games From Folktales 